Jacob Wetzel Heats Up in Second Season with Pelicans

August 8, 2022 by Sam Weiderhaft

Baseball is the sport of the summer. Every night, there’s a game going on from early April to September. Players can be fatigued both mentally and physically as the season goes on with the number of games.

In his second season with the Pelicans, outfielder Jacob Wetzel has flipped that narrative by playing his best baseball in July, right in the middle of the “dog days of summer”. Wetzel has played 80 games this season with 67 of those being in right field.

After coming out of community college in his home state of Maryland in 2020, Wetzel was signed as an undrafted free agent in June of that year. By the time Minor League Baseball came back in 2021, Wetzel was assigned to Myrtle Beach in the second week of the season.

In his first year in the Cubs organization, Wetzel was a staple of the outfield, playing the second-most games on the team at 86 and leading the Birds in RBI with 45. He hit .229 on the year with eight home runs.

In 2022, Wetzel came back to the beach for his age-22 season. He found his place as the starting right fielder alongside Pete Crow-Armstrong in center and Ezequiel Pagan in left. While the hitting started slow for Wetzel, he dazzled fans each night with his acrobatic catches in right, including a diving catch on April 27th against the Columbia Fireflies to end the game. That play landed him at the number two spot on the next morning’s SportsCenter Top 10 plays.

“I love defense,” Wetzel said in an interview in June. “I take pride in that. Even in batting practice I’m out here running hard as I can and trying to get every ball I can, it’s a part of who I am.”

The bat took a few months to get going. Wetzel hit just .197 in the first three months of the season with 58 strikeouts. That all flipped around when the calendar hit July.

Wetzel exploded for a batting average of .296 through 23 games in July, his highest monthly average as a Pelican. Seven of his nine home runs were hit in the month with 21 RBI, and he struck out just nine times in 81 at-bats.

The best game of his professional career came just two days after the All-Star break in Charleston. On July 23rd, Wetzel logged the first three-hit game of his career with a pair of home runs and six runs batted in. The lefty set many career highs that night and propelled the Pelicans to a 14-4 victory against one of the toughest teams in the league.

“He opened up his stance and that freed him up,” Pelicans’ manager Buddy Bailey said. “He’s hit some balls to the pull side with a lot of authority, the home runs have been pulled. He’s a gamer and he listens to people’s advice.”

Through the first series in August, the strikeout numbers are getting lower as Wetzel continues to make good contact. With the skills he has on defense and the hitting coming around in the second half of the season, the Pelicans will rely on Wetzel as a leader with the playoffs getting closer.